Land Use Database

These buildings on the edge of the Seal Beach Weapons Station in Orange County originally belonged to the Rockwell Corporation, until Boeing purchased most of Rockwell in 1996, rechristening the facility as the Boeing Space and Communications Group. At the time of the purchase, Rockwell was a...

Fort Greely is a launch site for anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs), designed to shoot down enemy missiles that might be coming over the arctic to bomb the USA. It is a component of the national Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). The only other fixed battery of ABMs is at Vandenberg Air Force...

General Electric operates a multifaceted and remote field test station, 60 miles from Cincinnati, in the rural, rolling hills near the town of Peebles. The secretive 7,000 acre site has test stands and other support facilities for testing aircraft engines, and for various defense projects. General...

Major aviation and aeronautics R&D complex, operated by NASA. Over 3,400 employees develop propulsion, power, and communications technologies for application to aeronautics and space. Started in 1941, as the Aircraft Engine Research Lab, the Glenn Center (formerly called the Lewis Center)...

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center develops satellites and related technologies, and designs and coordinates space missions. It includes two sites: the 1,121-acre main facility at Greenbelt, MD, and the 6,188-acre Wallops Flight Center at Wallops Island. Over 10,000 people work at Goddard, which...

Goldstone is the largest tracking station in the Deep Space Network, which is composed of three installations located at roughly 120-degree intervals around the globe (with one at Madrid, Spain, and another at Canberra, Australia) for a continuous view of space. Part of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab,...

This Department of Energy (DOE) uranium mill and laboratory was originally founded as a source of uranium for the Manhattan Project. It later became the center of the government-initiated uranium mining boom of the 1940s and 1950s, propelled by the defense department's continuing need for fuel for...

Until 1965, this massive, remote airport in eastern Washington was Larson Air Force Base, primarily a bomber training base for B-52 crews. It is now run by the County, and houses an interesting mix of functions around the 13,500-foot runway, one of the largest in the country: Japan Air Lines used...

Gray Butte may be the largest private unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) airport in the USA. It is General Atomics' main test center, where the company’s Predator and Reaper UAVs are regularly flown. The company has operated for years out of the nearby El Mirage Lake airport, which it developed with the...

Area 51 is a portion of the Nellis Range Complex where the Groom Lake Base is located. The base which, still, officially doesn't exist, is a test and development installation that has been used by the Air Force, CIA, and other government agencies. Though no official confirmation has been obtained,...

Created in the late 1950's by the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, which managed the facility until 2012, when SRI International took over, the site was initially the home of the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Association (BIMA) radio telescope array,...

The Haystack Observatory is located in a complex of radio antennas in the hills above Westford and Tyngsboro. Inside the facility's dome is a 121-foot-diameter steerable radio dish, which while designed by MIT's Lincoln Lab, was built by the U.S. Air Force. Construction began in 1960, with the...

The legendary Canadian weapons engineer Gerald Bull operated a test site that straddled the international border, near Jay, Vermont. First known as Highwater Station (the name coming from the closest town on the Canadian side) the location was created on land Bull already owned in the 1960s to...

A field test complex, owned and operated by the research and development division of the Honda Motor Company, until its closing in 2010, when testing operations were relocated to Marysville, Ohio. Despite its large size, the complex strived to keep a low profile and was hard to see from public...

A research lab and think tank that was operated by the Hughes Aircraft Company for many years, HRL, on a hill above Malibu, is now operated as a joint project between defense giants Boeing and Raytheon, as well as General Motors (which bought this division of Hughes in 1985). Activities pursued...

Hurricane Mesa Test Track is a research and development, test and evaluation (R&D,T&E) facility, located at a dramatic and remote site, atop a mesa in southern Utah. The primary feature of the installation is a 12,000 foot-long test track, the only privately owned supersonic test track...

Work at the JPL is primarily related to designing and building satellites and space probes, and communicating with them once they are deployed. Most of the programs are conducted for NASA, such as the several Mars missions, and other planetary orbiter missions. The installation is a densely...

A nonprofit R&D lab, specializing in weapons for the Navy, operated by Johns Hopkins University. Similar in some respects to MIT's Draper Lab, this lab was formed by the Department of Defense in WWII, as a weapons research and development lab and think tank. Located on a 365-acre compound,...

Mission control center for NASA's space flights, and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Texas. A new visitors center/entertainment facility was built in 1992, featuring the best that the NASA and Walt Disney team could produce for $70 million. In 1995, a control room for the...

A diversified weapons R&D and component manufacturing facility, owned by the Department of Energy, and operated by Honeywell. Makes non-nuclear components of nuclear bombs and in the late 1980's it had a budget of $500 million. Part of the Bannister Federal Complex, south of Kansas City.

A complex of assembly buildings and rocket launch sites, established in the 1960's for the Apollo program, and now the launch site for NASA space missions. Located on around 100 square miles at the north end of Merritt Island, adjacent to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (where military...

More than 20 telescopes are clustered at the summit of Kitt Peak, from radio telescopes to solar telescopes. It is the location of the 4-meter National Optical Astronomy Observatory Mayall telescope, one of the world's largest, and the unusual McMath-Pierce solar telescope, which projects an image...

A well-known and innovative sustainable agriculture research and advocacy organization, headquartered in this suburban-looking house, surrounded by trails and research gardens - in the heart of the Heartland, Salina Kansas. The Land Institute researches and promotes agricultural methods which...

A rambling complex in the hills behind the campus, Lawrence Berkeley Lab is a historic physics research facility adjacent to the University of California, Berkeley, which operates the lab for the Department of Energy. Several unique facilities have been built at Lawrence Berkeley over the years,...

An observatory atop Mount Hamilton, a 4,200 foot mountain east of San Jose, operated by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Facilities include five modern telescopes, including the 3-meter Shane optical telescope, one of the most productive research scopes in the world, as well as the latest...

LIGO - the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory - is a research facility on the grounds of the Hanford Reservation, built to record otherwise undetectable gravitational waves striking the earth. The facility consists of a control building, from which a pair of two mile long, ground-...

Lincoln Lab is a large electronic technology R&D center operated by MIT, and located on the edge of Hanscom Air Force Base, to which it is physically and financially connected. It was founded off campus in 1951, to continue research developed by the Rad Lab, the pioneering World War II radar...

One of the major military aircraft plants in the USA, Marietta is one of three of Lockheed Martin's largest aircraft facilities. Marietta has manufactured over 2,500 of all models of the C-130 Hercules, one of the most famous tactical airlifters ever made. One of the world's largest aircraft, the C...

Work on the Trident missile and other surface-to-air missiles is performed here, at this remote lab and field test facility in the hills north of Santa Cruz. Several test site areas are scattered around the woods here.